our hearts swell like a water at weight
by Gray Doll
Summary: Her eyes were on him, then, and he concentrated on being a part of Jem. For himself. For Tessa. For his own damn sanity. - AU, Will/Tessa/Jem


**a.n/** First infernal devices fic - au, set in modern times. Includes Jem/Tessa, Will/Tessa, and Will/Jem. I'm not entirely sure about how it turned out, but I enjoyed writing it!

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There is love in our bodies and it holds us together  
But pulls us apart when we're holding each other  
We all want something to hold in the night  
We don't care if it hurts or we're holding too tight  
- FLORENCE & THE MACHINE

**.**

**.**

**our hearts swell like a water at weight**

**.**

**.**

There is a story, about a girl and two boys, and everybody knows it. It's as old as time, some say, and it's beautiful and sad and tragic and romantic. It started, once, years and years ago; and it ended, yet some think it did not.

But what's important is that this is not that story, and these are not its pages.

This is the story of two people who tore each other apart.

And one who died.

**.**

Tessa met Jem for the first time on a plane to Seattle. They sat beside each other for six hours, her in the aisle seat, him in the center, but they did not speak until they waited on the runway for their gate to clear. The 'fasten seatbelt' sign was still on when he asked to borrow her cell phone. His was dead.

She didn't mind, not that she'd thought she would. He hadn't gone to the bathroom once in the entire ride, hadn't asked her to get up, hadn't ordered anything alcoholic when the beverage cart had come through. Tessa handed him the phone with a polite smile. He said thank you and made a call.

For exactly three minutes and thirty-one seconds, she listened to him talk to someone. She didn't count the time, but knew it later, when she went into her call history to look at the number he had dialed.

"Yes. I know. I'm calling— Will you be quiet and listen for a moment? Please? Yes. I'm calling to tell you that I landed safely. Absolutely not. The woman sitting next to me, it was very kind of her. Alright. I love you."

He handed the phone back when he was done. He said thank you again, with a smile of his own that made his whole face brighten and his eyes wrinkle beautifully at the sides, and unbuckled his seatbelt even though the 'fasten seatbelt' sign was still on. She never knew about why she noticed that. When she thought about it later, she wondered how the words he had spoken could have filled three minutes and thirty-one seconds. She supposed that the person on the other line had talked much more than he had.

"Your girlfriend?" she asked, even though it was none of her business.

He smiled another smile, a fond little thing that made something catch in her throat. "Yeah," he said. "Something like that."

Which didn't stop her from calling the number he had dialed. It had been a week, and she said that she was looking for someone with black hair streaked with the faintest silver.

It surprised her when a man answered the phone. She held out a crisp ten-dollar bill to the barista who was handling her latte, and then tucked the phone more tightly between her shoulder and her ear. Then she introduced herself.

**.**

_Her uncle is gay. For some reason, this makes Tessa's mother cry. Tessa doesn't understand, fully, since she's only eight, and she's only heard the word at school. She understands that it's an insult, for reasons unknown._

_But she does hug her mother, and apologize, and watch television with her for an hour until she's certain that her mother's eyes are no longer red and puffy. She hears her parents fighting, later, and she can guess what it's about._

_She hopes she isn't gay, because she doesn't want to make her mother disappointed and sad._

_That November, her uncle brings a man she doesn't know with him to their Thanksgiving dinner. When her mother isn't looking, he explains to Tessa that she has two uncles, now. Tessa really likes the new uncle. And he tells her the best stories, and knows how to juggle._

**.**

Though it had been their story for a long time before it was hers, Tessa always considered this first phone conversation with Will the beginning of everything.

It was through this conversation that she first found out that the man with the silver streaked hair who had borrowed her phone was named Jem, and that his 'something like that' turned out to be a man. A very interesting sounding man, who calmly informed her that Jem was out, and who didn't act as though it was strange for her to be calling. He called her curiosity 'endearing,' and laughed at her jokes, and promised to tell Jem that she had called when he came home later.

She honestly hadn't expected him to make good on his promise, and she was prepared to let it go. She'd taken a chance on a big fish, and felt no shame in coming up short.

It was nearly midnight when something tugged on the line. It was Jem, calling, because his boyfriend had told him to.

**.**

'_Really?' Will asks._

_Jem replies, 'Really.'_

_They sit in silence for a moment, on Jem's porch, beneath an unlit window that Will has climbed through a thousand times before, until Jem clarifies. He says, 'I think,' and Will considers him._

_'You think?' he repeats. He isn't skeptical, he just asks because he wants to hear it again._

_'I think,' Jem says, again. They're doing a lot of repeating._

_'But it's okay,' Jem hurries on. 'There's one thing I'm sure of.'_

_He reaches over and takes Will's hand._

_'Cool,' Will says quietly, inadequately. It's perfect. He hasn't felt this much like himself in his entire life._

**.**

The fact that she sat between them on the couch made Will uncomfortable. She was not drawing Jem away, as she might have had Jem sat in the middle. She did not wedge them apart, either, as he had assumed would be the case the moment that she thrown herself into the meager space. What made him uncomfortable was the distinct lack of everything he expected. It was the way that she connected them.

The sole of her bare foot brushed against his knee. The fingers of her left hand played with the sleek strands of hair at the nape of Jem's neck. She quoted Star Wars, aloud, in the middle of the movie. She seemed, strangely, to have no idea what she was doing.

And strangely enough, neither did Will. He did not even know why.

It was probably because she wanted to. She looked like a woman who wanted to do what she wanted. He couldn't find anything wrong with that.

When she said, jokingly, that Jem had taken her phone, and she had taken his heart, Will laughed so hard that Coke came out of his nose. He didn't know why he laughed, but he thought that the fact that Jem had only _borrowed_ her phone was probably important.

Behind her back, Jem reached for Will's hand.

'Luke. I am your father,' Tessa said pompously, brushing hair out of her face. Her can of Coke left a ring on the table that never came out.

**.**

_It's 1994, and they're standing beneath a sun-soaked awning in the middle of New York City. They're nearly two hours late for a school day that they don't plan on attending, their pockets full of crumpled bus tickets, and miss-match wads of money, and the maps that Jem had printed out that morning. The tattoo parlor is jut around the corner, and here, Jem hesitates._

_Will teases him, laughing, and tells him that he has an APUSH test that he's missing for this, so Jem had better make good._

_In the end, Jem doesn't get the tattoo._

_He's grounded for skipping school, and wisely keeps his mouth shut about his intentions._

_Will climbs through the window that night and writes PROPERTY OF WILL HERONDALE on Jem's lower back in permanent marker. The 'tattoo' includes an arrow pointing clearly at Jem's ass._

_Jem skips swim practice for an entire week._

**.**

What ensued was a crazy kind of friendship, one that, in the beginning, was not about the sex. Tessa was a bank teller, who wore neat, carefully ironed slacks and pretty pastel tops to work, and drank coffee in the mornings, and sometimes even at night. She had a tattoo on the inside of her knee. Will asked her once if it hurt when she got it. She told him, no, and didn't often wear shorts, and he did not see it again for a very long time.

She went on a double date with them, one time, and carefully said all of the exactly right things. Her boyfriend was a doctor. Like the tattoo, Will never saw him again.

He did not even put her number in his phone, simply answered when she called, whether it be for him, or for Jem, when the latter was not answering his phone or had— on one occasion —dropped it into a drain pipe while on business in New York. It was far too late, by the time he realized that she was going to be permanent, and Will had already memorized the number.

'Hey, Tess,' he said cutely, when she called.

'Where's the violinist?' she would reply with a grin, and Will would wonder where the hell she had come from.

**.**

_It's 1999, and they're standing in the apartment that they purchased together a few weeks before. The place is still sparsely furnished, but it's home. They're making lists of all the names they have ever been called by the other._

_Brother._

_Lover._

_Partner._

_Friend._

_And when Jem reads his way down to GOD, he smacks Will over the head with the spiral bound notebook, which happens to say 'Papermate' in small letters on the blue plastic cover, and asks why he can't take this seriously in a long-suffering voice._

_Will holds Jem down and draws a handlebar mustache on his face in ballpoint pen._

_Later, when Jem calls out during sex, "Oh God", Will laughs so hard that he falls off the bed._

**.**

Tessa sat on the edge of the bed, sorting through paint samples. Will was in the other room, reorganizing the refrigerator. It was full of Chinese food, and half empty soda cans. Jem could hear the rustle of the garbage bag. The bed sheets were cool against his bare feet.

Tessa held up a paint chip, blue, and then set it down in the 'maybe' pile, to her right. It was followed by a green, a yellow, and a muted red. After a few moments, she handed him the pile. Jem took them from her, ignoring the way that their thumbs brushed, and the fact that she was doing something that was hardly her job, since this was not her home, not her bedroom.

As he looked at the colors, he could feel Tessa's eyes on him, could hear Will banging the fridge door open and closed. Outside, Seattle traffic roared through the streets below. A car horn blared. Jem wasn't seeing the colors.

It was times like this when he wished that life came like an Internet survey. He could picture the questions now, scrawled across the skin of Tessa's bare feet where they rested, inches from his own.

The questions said:

_Do you feel like you really like her?_

Does she feel like she really likes you?

If you answered 'yes' to the above questions, why aren't you saying so to each other?

In the space provided below that last, Jem would have written a single four letter name.

'I like this one,' he said, after he had sorted through the colors, twice. He held out the blue. Tessa took it and gave a small smile.

'Herondale blue' she said. 'Lovely.'

**.**

_It's New Years Eve, and they're standing in the middle of a crowded room. It's been a long time since Will has stood in the living room of Jem's childhood home, since he's hugged Charlotte, and smelled her cookies baking. It's been a long time since he needed to pretend that he and Jem were merely friends._

_It was not annoyance that makes him uncomfortable, but the absent weight of Jem's hand in his. He cannot empathize with Jem's concerns, estranged as he is from his own father and siblings. But he does sympathize, knowing the Branwells all his life, understanding their high expectations, aware that, though their disapproval might be far from certain, should Jem receive it, the blow would be crippling._

_So he smiles, and thanks Mrs. Branwell for inviting him into her home, and chases Jessamine around all night like a lecherous bachelor should. It makes Jem angry, but he doesn't find out until later, when they're tucked up in Jem's old room. His adoptive mother has fixed Will a bed on the floor, which he lies in, forlorn, and frowns._

_Sometime towards midnight, Jem seems to sense that he's awake. His hand, dangling from the edge of the bed, finds Will's._

**.**

They had sex for the first time like old people. Tessa lay on her back beneath him, hands roaming across his back, knees curved up, toes pointed inches above the bed sheets. Jem moaned. She moaned. Will watched from the chair in the corner and tried to figure out why he was so aroused.

There was nothing attractive about it, though Tessa was clearly trying. The point of her toe elongated her calves, but he didn't care about that, or the marks her fingernails left on Jem's skin. He didn't care about the way Jem's hips flexed each time he thrust forward. It was over quickly. Neither of them even broke a sweat.

Tessa did not stay. In the darkness, as she dressed, her eyes like two dinner plates found Will's. She didn't smile. Her purse was black. And then she was gone.

Jem paced back and forth, naked, for one minute and fifteen seconds. Will knew because that was how long he could hold his breath, and when he let it go, Jem turned to face him. They made love, though Will barely felt a thing, and never came. He was too busy thinking about Tessa, and how her eyes were big and gray, and how he still couldn't figure her out because.

Jem didn't say anything when they finished.

Maybe this is what love means, Will thought as Jem padded to the bathroom and back in the darkness. Lying beneath someone who has grown a bit too fat, or too bald, or too different without warning you first, and picturing them how they used to be. And maybe, eventually, your memory starts to go, and you thank god that sex will always be sex, and the person who you picture is a figment of your imagination— it's a combination of the person you think you're supposed to remember, and Harrison Ford from the Han Solo years, and a pair of bright, curious gray eyes that smile at you in the darkness.

**.**

_She starts doing track and field when she's a freshman in high school. There's another girl on the team who Tessa can't help but notice. By all accounts, she's a lesbian, which means that she has weirdly short hair, and that Rick Frey, who is a senior, and a jock, and an asshole, tried to feel her up behind the school one day. She said no. That's why she's a lesbian._

_Tessa watches her one afternoon, tying her shoe before they run. Her hair has fallen down into her eyes. Tessa thinks her name is Sophie. Then she thinks of her mother, crying._

_'Hey,' she says quietly. Because she doesn't care if Sophie is a lesbian or not. It's more likely that Rick is a liar, and a dumbass, but it's most likely that it doesn't matter, either way._

_In the graduation photos, three years later, Sophie and Tessa hug each other, smiling._

**.**

On a rainy day in November, Jem came down with the flu. He lay in bed, moaning, until Will finally called Tessa in the middle of the night.

Jem never even knew that she was there. She was gone by morning. But she and Will sat on the sofa, late into the night, rewatching the same old movies for the thousandth time. They quoted, quietly, under her breath, and they ate those long, colorful tubes of ice without having put them in the freezer.

She sang the opening lines of 'Mr. Sandman' as she drew herself out the door just before dawn.

**.**

_It's mid-afternoon and the sunshine smells like potato chips. Will and Jem stand inside their favorite record store for two hours. It's going out of business._

_They don't buy anything, but Will kisses him in the middle of the street beneath the sun that day, and Jem remembers it, vividly, for the rest of his life._

**.**

It was only after he hurt her that Will realized that he didn't hate her.

All he could think about, when Jem sat down in the chair, was his hips, tense, and her goddamn pointed toes. She'd done that for him, not for Jem, and she didn't even know if he liked women.

He wanted to tell her that he didn't. But that was a damn lie. So he took her up against the wall instead. Her head banged against the drywall so hard that he thought that she would leave a dent. There were bruises on her hips in the morning, which Will didn't see because she didn't stay the night. And she had left a bite mark on the side of his neck.

Jem made love to him after she was gone, because Will begged him. After he finished, Jem stood and tried to kiss him on the mouth. Will turned away.

Jem brushed his teeth in silence. It was 3:31AM.

**.**

_It's 2001. Will puts nails purposely through the wall in their second apartment because the landlord rubbed him the wrong way. He hangs some ugly paintings that he and Jem bought, laughing._

_He leaves the nails there when they move out, a year later._

**.**

Her great big gray eyes were staring at him. Will was suddenly terrified. He stood in the middle of the hallway and stared back at her without a word.

She asked him if he felt bad for her.

Will did not answer for a long time. He did not believe that she had asked the question. But the answer was 'no,' anyway. He could not feel bad for something that he did not understand.

'I love him,' she said finally. Her purse was black. 'I don't know if I have a right to, but I do.'

'I'm his partner,' Will said. The freezing beer in his hand was starting to make his fingers numb. He remembered the pleasant hum of the refrigerator, but he was ashamed, suddenly, of the weakness of the word. Jem could marry Tessa, if he wanted to.

'But you won't tell me to go,' she said. She was walking, now, toward him, past him. Her knuckles brushed the doorknob. 'And you're a part of him, Will. I won't tell you to go, either.'

Even after she had left, he could not consider her his enemy. He could not blame her— nor did he want to —for staking a claim on what was his. He had never even asked her not to.

When he crawled back into bed with Jem, he wrapped his arms around his waist and pulled him close. 'I loved you,' he said, 'even when we were kids.' Jem smiled and kissed his forearm where it crossed his chest and said that he knew.

Will's desire to believe this statement was almost strong enough for him not to notice that Tessa had left a book on his bedside table.

The bookmark was red, and dog-eared. She chewed on it while she read the next time she came over, and when she complained that her feet were cold, Jem pulled the sheets up over her while Will went to adjust the thermostat.

She had sex with Jem a total of three more times. She never had sex with Will again.

It was never about that, anyway.

**.**

_She owns a pet bird for a period of three weeks, when it flies into her apartment unbidden and refuses to leave. She throws breadcrumbs all over the counter in the mornings, and the bird eats them, and this makes her laugh and laugh until her stomach cramps. For some reason._

_It's 2001._

_The bird dies. Tessa doesn't cry for it._

**.**

She bought him ice cream cake on his birthday. It was his favorite flavor, and the frosting was yellow and blue, and the hug she gave him was honest and warm. When she pulled away, Will caught Jem looking at them.

He looked hungry. He didn't have a piece of cake.

Will felt such strong affection in that moment that he went up to her, afterward, and lifted her off her feet and thanked her, again. He didn't kiss her, or try to make it sexual. He was simply happy to know her.

Then he set her down, and she studied him carefully before asking why he thought Jem hadn't wanted a slice.

That was the same night that she realized Will did not have her number in his phone. It was the night she realized a lot of things. She was carding through his cell phone, bored, while he washed dishes and cleared the table now that all the guests had gone.

'Who is this?' she asked suddenly, brandishing the phone in his direction. His hands were covered in water and dish soap, so he didn't take it from her. She had been going through his pictures, and the one she showed him then was of Jem and Cecily, with him at the beach. Cecily had a particularly angry expression on her face. He smiled.

'That's my sister,' he said. She didn't ask another question.

The next morning, he found Tessa phone number plugged into his phone.

_the most FABULOUS Tessa Gray,_ it said. Will didn't laugh. And then he did.

**.**

_It's 2001. Will and Tessa pass each other in a shopping mall a few days before Christmas. They barely spare the other a passing glance._

_Years later, though neither knows it, it's this moment that answers the question:_

_If it had been Will sitting next to her on that plane, and there was no Jem in his life to _make_ him Will, would she have spared him a second thought?_

**.**

Jem died peacefully in the morning on a spring day in 2010. He was in the bath.

It was mother's day, and Will was already dressed. He was making breakfast, and he called into the other room to tell Jem that they ought to call his mother, and then Tessa, and maybe then go out for a bite.

'Charlotte?' Jem called back. 'Tessa?' Will thought he heard him begin to get up.

'Yeah,' Will called back. When Jem never got out of the bath, Will went to check on him.

The blue paint had been peeling in small spots around the doorway for weeks.

**.**

_The restaurant is new, but it's just up the street, and it delivers. This is what prompts Jem to bring the menu home in the first place, but they end up going out to eat there, anyway. Will has sweet potato soup, and Jem has some kind of sandwich. Neither of them can ever remember what it is, afterwards._

_It's Will who ends up with the nasty case of food poisoning, vomiting into the toilet for nearly twenty-four hours. Jem sits on the edge of the bathtub and reads from an issue of Cosmo magazine that got delivered to them by mistake._

_Will throws a bar of soap at him, and never apologizes._

_They don't think about the issue of Cosmo again until Will is cleaning out Jem's bedside table, years later. He manages to stop himself from crying, but when he offers it to Tessa, she laughs and says she never reads those things._

_Against his better judgment, Will keeps it._

**.**

At the funeral, Will almost put his arm around Charlotte Branwell. Henry got there first, luckily, since it was not Will's place. Maybe if he had been a woman, and he and Jem had gotten married, he would have been welcome to touch. Will had not even attended her adoptive daughter's funeral, he couldn't even remember how many godforsaken years ago it was when Jessamine had died.

When she saw Tessa, dressed in black, tears streaming down her cheeks, Charlotte asked if she was Jem's girlfriend. Tessa turned and caught Will's eye. He stood quietly beside the casket. They looked at each other for one long, heavy moment.

'No,' Tessa said finally, quietly. She reached out and took Will's hand. Charlotte apologized, and, soon after, walked away.

Tessa came home with him that night, on the airplane, in the taxi, through the familiar door into the apartment that he had shared for so many years with Jem. Her looked at her. Her purse was pink. Will hid it underneath the bed, so that when she tried to leave, she couldn't.

For the first time, Tessa stayed for the entire night. They held each other, but they didn't cry.

Her delicate black dress that was decorated with little roses at the bust was wrinkled in the morning, and the pillow smelled like her hair. It was this that made him cry, at last.

But the sound of her showering drowned out every sob.

**.**

_Tessa's brother dies when she is still in college. Her aunt flies her home, and cries like Tessa hasn't seen her for a very long time. Try as she might, Tessa cannot bring herself to comfort her. Every time she wraps her arm around her mother's shoulders, she thinks of her uncle, and his husband, and Sophie who turned out not to be gay. She pulls back her arm._

_After the funeral, Tessa leaves. She skips the reception and goes straight to the airport, where the books the first flight back to school._

_Her roommate is sleeping, when she gets in, and lucky she never asks why Tessa comes back so early._

**.**

They continued to see each other, after that, but they never had sex. Will never saw the tattoo on the inside of her knee, even though they slept in the same bed, and he held her at night, and she decided to take charge of her diet, just because.

In the years that followed, he thought a lot about what she had said, that one night. _And you're a part of him, Will_, she had said to him. That statement, he thought, was not the beginning. It had been the lifting of the veil. It had been the moment when he realized that what she was saying was true.

After the funeral, it became clearer. Charlotte never called the apartment anymore. Without Jem, Will was nothing. He tried to keep him alive, to make his actions reek of Jem. But it was like an arm trying to run a marathon for a man who's lost his legs. Will tried, hard, and shook like a dying fish on the shores of all the vibrancy of who Jem used to be. Tessa even watched him do it.

He didn't think that she had ever loved him, just the idea she had put together of him as just another piece of Jem. It had been Jem-and-Will, all along. If Jem-without-Will had sat next to her, on that plane, she would have cleared her call history in a month, or two, and met a banker, and gotten married and had babies and had sex with someone who was suddenly too fat but looked like Harrison Ford when she closed her eyes and remembered hard enough.

He was like that to her even now, he thought, as she twisted the heavy shackle of her wedding ring round and round her finger. She was reading a book that he had never read. She had told him the title yesterday. He had already forgotten it, and he did not even duck his head to look.

He was a token, now, a lost tooth that a mother keeps in a little bag to remind her of her child's youth. He was something dead and useless, made bright and promising by the meaning projected upon it. Her eyes were on him, then, and he concentrated on being a part of Jem.

For himself. For Tessa. For his own damn sanity.

**.**

He took Tessa out for dinner and dancing, where they resolutely held hands above the table while they waited for their foot. Their skin touched with grim determination.

Tessa laughed every time he stepped on her toes, dancing.

Yes, he thought. Good. They looked normal. They looked happy. His eyes darted around behind her back, and caught another man's eye. He was dining alone, eating an expensive steak. Will knew that it was expensive because he purposely hadn't ordered it. Tessa didn't work anymore. But the man nodded, a half inclination of his head, a polite response from someone caught looking.

_See_, Will thought. _We are perfect_.

Normal people didn't go out on dates for the sole purpose of proving it.

**.**

_Tessa likes a good New York bialy. She likes babies who wear onesies, and the Captain America boxer briefs that she stole from one of her college boyfriends and wears as pajamas. She likes Jane Austen, and canned peas, and she considers putting canned mushrooms on pizza a cardinal sin._

_Her hair is brown and her eyes are gray and make her look like she's lighting them up in the darkness. Love, for her, is about pretending to be with someone for the purpose of pretending to be with someone else. She doesn't know this last bit, yet, but she will soon enough._

_She meets a man named Jem Carstairs on a plane to Seattle. It's 2009._

_He asks to borrow her cell phone._

**.  
**  
For a very long time, she lived with Will.

**.**

_When they are eight, Will locks Jem in the big trunk in Jem's bedroom. They are playing a game that mandates it, and it never even occurs to either of them that this might not make it the right thing to do._

_'Now struggle,' he calls through the wood. 'Like you're trying to get out.' Jem laughs, and pushes up on the lid. Will sits on it, smiling._

_That is how Charlotte Branwell catches them. She is livid when she pulls Will off by the collar of his t-shirt and unlocks the trunk. She sends Will home._

_When he's gone, she tells Jem that if they ever do anything like that again, he and Will won't be able to be friends._

_Jem cries, but there is too much coming for them, and that is not the end._

**.**

For some reason, they didn't find out about the will until years later. A load of pointless possessions found their way to the little house in the suburbs, where Will greeted the moving men at the door, and carried everything up to the attic on his own. 331, the number on the front door says.

Years ago, he would not have broken a sweat lifting all these things. Now, the unsightly stains appeared beneath his arms and on his back. He wondered if he was getting old. Part of him thought that he would never really know.

The last item was not the heaviest, but it took the longest to carry up one flight of stairs and a ladder. Will almost left it for the next day, but decided it was best to get it over with.

It was a table. He remembered it best covered in Chinese food, and napkins, and cans of soda left out too long. He remembered it best with Jem's feet supported by it. He remembered it best, cleared, finally, after a birthday party he had thrown. He wondered why Jem had left him all the useless junk.

There was a ring on the table. Left by a Coke can. Placed by a person.

'Hey, darling?' Tessa called up.

'Coming,' he said, turning to the ladder that led back down to the hallway where his wife was waiting. If she was the ring, then he was the table. You couldn't have one without the other, anymore.

And, after all, it all belonged to Jem.


End file.
